Repression Resilience: Building anti-repression infrastructures and supporting political prisoners (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Skills- and Resource-Sharing Session

Abstract

As abolitionists and freedom fighters, we live in an age of struggle. The 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited the largest, most militant response to police terror in the United States since the 1960s. Scores of rebels against these conditions were arrested and caged in the midst of 2020’s uprisings. Since then, state repression against popular abolitionist movements have only escalated. In DeKalb County, Georgia, abolitionists, anarchists, Indigenous land defenders, and local coalitions have been fiercely fighting the Atlanta Police Foundation’s attempts to destroy 300 acres of forest to build a “Cop City.” The struggle to Stop Cop City, or Defend the Atlanta/Weelaunee Forest, has been met with heavy state repression: 61 forest defenders have been charged with RICO and 42 with Domestic Terrorism; 1 forest defender, was murdered by police; and Atlanta’s bail and legal support fund for activists was raided by a SWAT team. The Stop Cop City struggle has coincided with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which sparked a pro-choice direct action movement against fake abortion clinics and pro-life organizations, and subsequent repression of bodily autonomy defenders with felonies and terrorism enhancements. State attacks on bodily autonomy have increased with bans on gender-affirming healthcare and openly fascistic transphobic rhetoric, bolstered by liberal emphasis on free speech. Community activists like Krystal and Peppy DiPippa face incarceration and punishment for their alleged actions during a protest against a well-known transphobic provocateur. In 2024, police brutally attacked students and professors on campuses across the U.S. for protesting Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians. Casey Goonan remains incarcerated and deprived of diabetic-appropriate food in the Santa Rita jail for their alleged pro-Palestine vandalism at the University of California Berkeley.
All of these struggles and repression incidents have required adaptation from our movements. These tools enact the transformative power of proactive solidarity and organizing to cushion the blows of state repression, and ensure that targeted strugglers are held and supported in taking action and surviving state terror. Certainly, increased unrest and state repression characterizing the first half of the 2020s inspires fear and despair in those of us who struggle. Yet as strugglers, we are also inspired to remain resilient in the face of repression, and build our movements’ strength and capacity in response. This session will offer a skill and resource-sharing workshop with experienced anti-repression organizers and political prisoner and defendant support networks, in hopes of equipping abolitionists and freedom fighters for the struggles of today and tomorrow alike. Panelists in this session will offer their own experiential knowledge about how to fruitfully engage in anti-repression organizing, including (but not limited to) bail funds; jail, court, and legal support; legal, political, and media strategy; collective/movement defense; plea strikes; fundraising; and more. The session aims to help participants to organize anti-repression and prisoner/defendant support infrastructure and care networks within their own contexts.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Hannah Kass

• Autumn Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biographical Information

Hannah Kass is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on state repression of food sovereignty movements, land struggles, and abolitionist tendencies, and its role in enclosure and dispossession. She is also interested in how eco-defenders and abolitionists prefigure alternative life-worlds beyond and against property, resource grabbing, and authoritarian statecraft. Blending autoethnographic research as a criminalized forest defender with archival research of state and movement documents, her doctoral dissertation explores her research interests in the context of the Stop Cop City/Weelaunee forest struggle: an autonomous and decentralized movement fighting deforestation for the development of a militarized police training facility in DeKalb County, Georgia.

Autumn Miller (she/her pronouns) is a scholar-activist and PhD student in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers around body politics and state formations through examinations of the feminist anti-state and anti-capitalist potentials within fat studies. Coming from a long background in community organizing and radical political education, Autumn has given presentations about her scholarship in a wide variety of settings, both outside and inside the academy. The current trajectory of her research aims to develop theoretical underpinnings for solidarities and conversations between fat studies and anarchism and the possibilities of a fat anarchism, particularly in the current era of overt fascism.